In , the year-old Wilfred Owen enlisted in the British army. NBD, right? Not so much. Like many young boys, both in England and other countries on the eve of World War I , Owen had no idea what was in store for him.
At first, he was optimistic, and entertained all the illusions of grandeur that a young, sprightly thing is supposed to entertain. Plus he genuinely thought he was doing the right thing for his country.
All that feel-good feeling good lasted… not at all. Once he got into combat, and saw what was really going down, Owen knew that he had walked straight into the depths of Hell. To put it mildly, World War I was a terrible, terrible conflict.
New, more terrible killing methods gas and machine guns chief among them had been developed by the time of the war's outbreak Nearly 10 million soldiers died, another 20 million were wounded, and still another 7 or 8 million went missing altogether.
Owen himself experienced two harrowing brushes with death: at one point, he was blown into the air by an artillery fragment and landed in a pile of human remains. At another point, he got trapped in an old German trench. These events so scarred him that he was given medical leave for shell shock.
During his medical leave Owen met the now-famous poet Siegfried Sassoon , which was kind of a big deal. Under Sassoon's influence, Owen's poetry took a turn for the dark and the bleak, and as the war went on, things only got darker. Sometime between and , when Owen was killed just one week before the end of the war , he wrote "Arms and the Boy," and let Shmoop tell you: you don't get much darker than this sucker.
Like most of Owen's work, it's all about the horrors of war: killing, blood, death. In the final stanza, the speaker contrasts the weapons with the boy. He is gentle, with "fingers supple".
His teeth are not sharp or animal-like, as they are more fit for "laughing around an apple". He will not grow talons like a bird of prey or antlers like a beast of the forest. This will not happen because God will not let it, Owen explains. The boy is not fundamentally evil. This means, then, that it is man, and his weapons of war, that pervert Nature and turn this boy into a killing machine. He will take responsibility for guiding the "blind" bullets to their targets, to giving the "famished" bayonet the blood it desires.
Of course, the weapons do not appear in a vacuum; they are provided by the warmakers to the young men; therefore, Owen is excoriating those who take innocent boys, upend the natural cycle, and make them killers. The Question and Answer section for Wilfred Owen: Poems is a great resource to ask questions, find answers, and discuss the novel. What do you think Owen is saying about the relationship between poetry and war?
Poetry is woven into the fabric of war. No doubt drawing from personal experience, Owen is very sympathetic to the ways in which soldiers attempted to make sense of their peculiar and terrible situation on the front and back at home. Dulce et decorum est. In the poem Disabled, How successfully does the writer compare the idea of sport and war? Using which techniques and phrases? A madman's sudden unpredictable movement or passion?
Or the coloured patch of cloth that the mad were made to wear as a distinguishing emblem? Words as rich as this often carry ambiguity with them. Parallels too. Such a desire for sustenance finds common cause with revolutionary France's Madame Guillotine and her voracious appetite.
Once more we're bidden to accustom the boy to the feel of a range of weapons and ammunition. Bluntness replaces sharpness, with sexual overtones. To 'stroke' and 'nuzzle' seem to imply erotic pleasure in handling instruments of destruction. Stanza One's sharpness makes a return in line 8 but with a mental as well as physical connotation, alluding as it does to the 'grief and death' experienced by those who die and those who mourn - a stern reminder that what may begin as inappropriate self-indulgence will result inevitably in misery and extinction.
If Owen himself came into focus in line 8 he remains in view in the last stanza with his reminder of what this boy, who is being led towards militancy, in essence, ideally, is. Nature, including the human variety dominates the picture. Teeth are not for forming part of a cartridge but for 'laughing round an apple' 9. Fingers that caressed the bayonet-blade are simply 'supple' and no claws lurk behind them.
The boy's 'thick curls' speak of youthful innocence. No use leaving it to God then?
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